Faster Alternative to Unix Grep - unix

I'm trying to do the following
$ grep ">" file.fasta > output.txt
But it is taking so long when the input fasta file is large.
The input file looks like this:
>seq1
ATCGGTTA
>seq2
ATGGGGGG
Is there a faster alternative?

Use time command with all these
$> time grep ">" file.fasta > output.txt
$> time egrep ">" file.fasta > output.txt
$> time awk '/^>/{print $0}' file.fasta > output.txt -- If ">' is first letter
If you see the output..they are almost the same .
In my opinion ,if the data is in columnar format, then use awk to search.

Hand-built state machine. If you only want '>' to be accepted at the beginning of the line, you'll need one more state. If you need to recognise '\r' too, you will need a few more states.
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
int state,ch;
for(state=0; (ch=getc(stdin)) != EOF; ) {
switch(state) {
case 0: /* start */
if (ch == '>') state = 1;
else break;
case 1: /* echo */
fputc(ch,stdout);
if (ch == '\n') state = 0;
break;
}
}
if (state==1) fputc('\n',stdout);
return 0;
}
If you want real speed, you could replace the fgetc() and fputc() by their macro equivalents getc() and putc(). (but I think trivial programs like this will be I/O bound anyway)

For big files, the fastest possible grep can be accomplished with GNU parallel. An example using parallel and grep can be found here.
For your purposes, you may like to try:
cat file.fasta | parallel -j 4 --pipe --block 10M grep "^\>" > output.txt
The above will use four cores, and parse 10 MB blocks to grep. The block-size is optional, but I find using a 10 MB block-size quite a bit faster on my system. YRMV.
HTH

Ack is a good alternative to grep to find string/regex in code :
http://beyondgrep.com/

Related

AWK print unexpected newline or end of string inside shell

I have a shell script which is trying to trim a file from end of the line but I always get some error.
Shell Script:
AWK_EXPRESSION='{if(length>'"$RANGE1"'){ print substr('"$0 "',0, length-'"$RANGE2"'}) } else { print '"$0 "'} }'
for report in ${ACTUAL_TARGET_FOLDER}/* ; do
awk $AWK_EXPRESSION $report > $target_file
done
If I trigger the AWK command, I get unexpected newline or end of string near print.
What am I missing?
Why are you trying to store the awk body in a shell variable? Just use awk and the -v option to pass a shell value into an awk variable:
awk -v range1="$RANGE1" -v range2="$RANGE2" '{
if (length > range1) {
print substr($0,0, length-range2)
} else {
print
}
}' "$ACTUAL_TARGET_FOLDER"/* > "$target_file"
Add a few newlines to help readability.
Get out of the habit of using ALLCAPS variable names, leave those as reserved by the shell. One day you'll write PATH=something and then wonder why your script is broken.
Unquoted variables are subject to word splitting and glob expansion. Use double quotes for all your variables unless you know what specific side-effect you want to use.
I would recommend writing the AWK program using AWK variables instead of interpolating variables into it from the shell. You can pass variable into awk on the command line using the -v command line option.
Also, awk permits using white space to make the program readable, just like other programming languages. Like this:
AWK_EXPRESSION='{
if (length > RANGE1) {
print substr($0, 1, length-RANGE2)
} else {
print
}
}'
for report in "${ACTUAL_TARGET_FOLDER}"/* ; do
awk -v RANGE1="$RANGE1" -v RANGE2="$RANGE2" "$AWK_EXPRESSION" "$report" > "$target_file"
done

Is there any faster way to truncate column in Unix

I want to truncate 4th column of TSV file to given length in Unix. File has records in few millions and is of size 8GB.
I am trying this but it seems to be kind of slow.
awk -F"\t" '{s=substr($4,0,256); print $1"\t"$2"\t"$3"\t"s"\t"$5"\t"$6"\t"$7}' file > newFile
Is there any faster alternatives for same?
Thanks
Your command could be written a little more nicely (assuming you are re-building the record), which may give some performance increases:
awk 'BEGIN { FS=OFS="\t" } { $4 = substr($4,0,256) }' file > newFile
If you have access to a multi-core machine (which you probably do), you can use GNU parallel. You may want to vary the number of cores you use (I've set 4 here) and the block size that's fed to awk (I've set this to two megabytes)...
< file parallel -j 4 --pipe --block 2M -q awk 'BEGIN { FS=OFS="\t" } { $4 = substr($4,0,2) }' > newFile
Here's some testing I did on my system using a 2.7G file with 100 million lines and a block size of 2M:
time awk 'BEGIN { FS=OFS="\t" } { $4 = substr($4,0,2) }' file >/dev/null
Results:
real 1m59.313s
user 1m57.120s
sys 0m2.190s
With one core:
time < file parallel -j 1 --pipe --block 2M -q awk 'BEGIN { FS=OFS="\t" } { $4 = substr($4,0,2) }' >/dev/null
Results:
real 2m28.270s
user 4m3.070s
sys 0m41.560s
With four cores:
time < file parallel -j 4 --pipe --block 2M -q awk 'BEGIN { FS=OFS="\t" } { $4 = substr($4,0,2) }' >/dev/null
Results:
real 0m54.329s
user 2m41.550s
sys 0m31.460s
With twelve cores:
time < file parallel -j 12 --pipe --block 2M -q awk 'BEGIN { FS=OFS="\t" } { $4 = substr($4,0,2) }' >/dev/null
Results:
real 0m36.581s
user 2m24.370s
sys 0m32.230s
I’ll assume that your file has exactly one space character between fields and no whitespace at the beginning of the line.  If that is wrong, this can be enhanced. 
Otherwise, this should work:
sed 's/^\([^ ]* [^ ]* [^ ]* [^ ]\{1,256\}\)[^ ]* /\1 /'
I haven’t actually tested it with 256-character-long data (I tested it with \{1,2\} and I have no idea how its speed compares to that of awk.  BTW, on some versions, you might need to leave off the backslashes from the curly braces and use just {1,256}.
If Scott or Steve's solutions are still too slow, it may be time to break out the C. Run as ./a.out < file > newFile. Test on a small file with some long fields first; I am not 100% sure I have the math right.
#include <stdio.h>
int
main(void)
{
int field = 1;
int character = 0;
int c;
while ((c = getchar()) != EOF)
{
switch (c)
{
case '\n':
field = 1;
character = 0;
break;
case '\t':
character = 0;
field++;
break;
default:
character++;
break;
}
if (field != 4 || character < 256)
putchar(c);
}
if (ferror(stdout) || fflush(stdout) || fclose(stdout))
{
perror("write");
return 1;
}
return 0;
}

xxd -r without xxd

I'm running on a scaled down version of CentOS 5.5 without many tools available. No xxd, bc, or hd. I can't install any additional utilities, unfortunately. I do have od, dd, awk, and bourne shell (not bash). What I'm trying to do is relatively simple in a normal environment. Basically, I have a number, say 100,000, and I need to store its binary representation in a file. Typically, I'd do something like ...
printf '%x' "100000" | xxd -r -p > file.bin
If you view a hex dump of the file, you'd correctly see the number represented as 186A0.
Is there an equivalent I can cobble together using the limited tools I have available? Pretty much everything I've tried stores the ascii values for the digits.
You can do it with a combination of your printf, awk, and your shell.
#!/usr/bin/env awk
# ascii_to_bin.awk
{
# Pad out the incoming integer to a full byte
len = length($0);
if ( (len % 2) != 0) {
str = sprintf("0%s", $0);
len = len + 1;
}
else {
str = $0;
}
# Create your escaped echo string
printf("echo -n -e \"");
for(i=1;i<=len;i=i+2) {
printf("\\\\x%s", substr(str, i, 2));
}
printf("\"");
}
Then you can just do
$ printf '%x' "100000" | awk -f ascii_to_bin.awk | /bin/sh > output.bin
If you know your target binary length you can just do a printf "%0nX" (n is the target size) and remove the (len % 2) logic.

Removing trailing / starting newlines with sed, awk, tr, and friends

I would like to remove all of the empty lines from a file, but only when they are at the end/start of a file (that is, if there are no non-empty lines before them, at the start; and if there are no non-empty lines after them, at the end.)
Is this possible outside of a fully-featured scripting language like Perl or Ruby? I’d prefer to do this with sed or awk if possible. Basically, any light-weight and widely available UNIX-y tool would be fine, especially one I can learn more about quickly (Perl, thus, not included.)
From Useful one-line scripts for sed:
# Delete all leading blank lines at top of file (only).
sed '/./,$!d' file
# Delete all trailing blank lines at end of file (only).
sed -e :a -e '/^\n*$/{$d;N;};/\n$/ba' file
Therefore, to remove both leading and trailing blank lines from a file, you can combine the above commands into:
sed -e :a -e '/./,$!d;/^\n*$/{$d;N;};/\n$/ba' file
So I'm going to borrow part of #dogbane's answer for this, since that sed line for removing the leading blank lines is so short...
tac is part of coreutils, and reverses a file. So do it twice:
tac file | sed -e '/./,$!d' | tac | sed -e '/./,$!d'
It's certainly not the most efficient, but unless you need efficiency, I find it more readable than everything else so far.
here's a one-pass solution in awk: it does not start printing until it sees a non-empty line and when it sees an empty line, it remembers it until the next non-empty line
awk '
/[[:graph:]]/ {
# a non-empty line
# set the flag to begin printing lines
p=1
# print the accumulated "interior" empty lines
for (i=1; i<=n; i++) print ""
n=0
# then print this line
print
}
p && /^[[:space:]]*$/ {
# a potentially "interior" empty line. remember it.
n++
}
' filename
Note, due to the mechanism I'm using to consider empty/non-empty lines (with [[:graph:]] and /^[[:space:]]*$/), interior lines with only whitespace will be truncated to become truly empty.
As mentioned in another answer, tac is part of coreutils, and reverses a file. Combining the idea of doing it twice with the fact that command substitution will strip trailing new lines, we get
echo "$(echo "$(tac "$filename")" | tac)"
which doesn't depend on sed. You can use echo -n to strip the remaining trailing newline off.
Here's an adapted sed version, which also considers "empty" those lines with just spaces and tabs on it.
sed -e :a -e '/[^[:blank:]]/,$!d; /^[[:space:]]*$/{ $d; N; ba' -e '}'
It's basically the accepted answer version (considering BryanH comment), but the dot . in the first command was changed to [^[:blank:]] (anything not blank) and the \n inside the second command address was changed to [[:space:]] to allow newlines, spaces an tabs.
An alternative version, without using the POSIX classes, but your sed must support inserting \t and \n inside […]. GNU sed does, BSD sed doesn't.
sed -e :a -e '/[^\t ]/,$!d; /^[\n\t ]*$/{ $d; N; ba' -e '}'
Testing:
prompt$ printf '\n \t \n\nfoo\n\nfoo\n\n \t \n\n'
foo
foo
prompt$ printf '\n \t \n\nfoo\n\nfoo\n\n \t \n\n' | sed -n l
$
\t $
$
foo$
$
foo$
$
\t $
$
prompt$ printf '\n \t \n\nfoo\n\nfoo\n\n \t \n\n' | sed -e :a -e '/[^[:blank:]]/,$!d; /^[[:space:]]*$/{ $d; N; ba' -e '}'
foo
foo
prompt$
using awk:
awk '{a[NR]=$0;if($0 && !s)s=NR;}
END{e=NR;
for(i=NR;i>1;i--)
if(a[i]){ e=i; break; }
for(i=s;i<=e;i++)
print a[i];}' yourFile
this can be solved easily with sed -z option
sed -rz 's/^\n+//; s/\n+$/\n/g' file
Hello
Welcome to
Unix and Linux
For an efficient non-recursive version of the trailing newlines strip (including "white" characters) I've developed this sed script.
sed -n '/^[[:space:]]*$/ !{x;/\n/{s/^\n//;p;s/.*//;};x;p;}; /^[[:space:]]*$/H'
It uses the hold buffer to store all blank lines and prints them only after it finds a non-blank line. Should someone want only the newlines, it's enough to get rid of the two [[:space:]]* parts:
sed -n '/^$/ !{x;/\n/{s/^\n//;p;s/.*//;};x;p;}; /^$/H'
I've tried a simple performance comparison with the well-known recursive script
sed -e :a -e '/^\n*$/{$d;N;};/\n$/ba'
on a 3MB file with 1MB of random blank lines around a random base64 text.
shuf -re 1 2 3 | tr -d "\n" | tr 123 " \t\n" | dd bs=1 count=1M > bigfile
base64 </dev/urandom | dd bs=1 count=1M >> bigfile
shuf -re 1 2 3 | tr -d "\n" | tr 123 " \t\n" | dd bs=1 count=1M >> bigfile
The streaming script took roughly 0.5 second to complete, the recursive didn't end after 15 minutes. Win :)
For completeness sake of the answer, the leading lines stripping sed script is already streaming fine. Use the most suitable for you.
sed '/[^[:blank:]]/,$!d'
sed '/./,$!d'
Using bash
$ filecontent=$(<file)
$ echo "${filecontent/$'\n'}"
In bash, using cat, wc, grep, sed, tail and head:
# number of first line that contains non-empty character
i=`grep -n "^[^\B*]" <your_file> | sed -e 's/:.*//' | head -1`
# number of hte last one
j=`grep -n "^[^\B*]" <your_file> | sed -e 's/:.*//' | tail -1`
# overall number of lines:
k=`cat <your_file> | wc -l`
# how much empty lines at the end of file we have?
m=$(($k-$j))
# let strip last m lines!
cat <your_file> | head -n-$m
# now we have to strip first i lines and we are done 8-)
cat <your_file> | tail -n+$i
Man, it's definitely worth to learn "real" programming language to avoid that ugliness!
#dogbane has a nice simple answer for removing leading empty lines. Here's a simple awk command which removes just the trailing lines. Use this with #dogbane's sed command to remove both leading and trailing blanks.
awk '{ LINES=LINES $0 "\n"; } /./ { printf "%s", LINES; LINES=""; }'
This is pretty simple in operation.
Add every line to a buffer as we read it.
For every line which contains a character, print the contents of the buffer and then clear it.
So the only things that get buffered and never displayed are any trailing blanks.
I used printf instead of print to avoid the automatic addition of a newline, since I'm using newlines to separate the lines in the buffer already.
This AWK script will do the trick:
BEGIN {
ne=0;
}
/^[[:space:]]*$/ {
ne++;
}
/[^[:space:]]+/ {
for(i=0; i < ne; i++)
print "";
ne=0;
print
}
The idea is simple: empty lines do not get echoed immediately. Instead, we wait till we get a non-empty line, and only then we first echo out as much empty lines as seen before it, and only then echo out the new non-empty line.
perl -0pe 's/^\n+|\n+(\n)$/\1/gs'
Here's an awk version that removes trailing blank lines (both empty lines and lines consisting of nothing but white space).
It is memory efficient; it does not read the entire file into memory.
awk '/^[[:space:]]*$/ {b=b $0 "\n"; next;} {printf "%s",b; b=""; print;}'
The b variable buffers up the blank lines; they get printed when a non-blank line is encountered. When EOF is encountered, they don't get printed. That's how it works.
If using gnu awk, [[:space:]] can be replaced with \s. (See full list of gawk-specific Regexp Operators.)
If you want to remove only those trailing lines that are empty, see #AndyMortimer's answer.
A bash solution.
Note: Only useful if the file is small enough to be read into memory at once.
[[ $(<file) =~ ^$'\n'*(.*)$ ]] && echo "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
$(<file) reads the entire file and trims trailing newlines, because command substitution ($(....)) implicitly does that.
=~ is bash's regular-expression matching operator, and =~ ^$'\n'*(.*)$ optionally matches any leading newlines (greedily), and captures whatever comes after. Note the potentially confusing $'\n', which inserts a literal newline using ANSI C quoting, because escape sequence \n is not supported.
Note that this particular regex always matches, so the command after && is always executed.
Special array variable BASH_REMATCH rematch contains the results of the most recent regex match, and array element [1] contains what the (first and only) parenthesized subexpression (capture group) captured, which is the input string with any leading newlines stripped. The net effect is that ${BASH_REMATCH[1]} contains the input file content with both leading and trailing newlines stripped.
Note that printing with echo adds a single trailing newline. If you want to avoid that, use echo -n instead (or use the more portable printf '%s').
I'd like to introduce another variant for gawk v4.1+
result=($(gawk '
BEGIN {
lines_count = 0;
empty_lines_in_head = 0;
empty_lines_in_tail = 0;
}
/[^[:space:]]/ {
found_not_empty_line = 1;
empty_lines_in_tail = 0;
}
/^[[:space:]]*?$/ {
if ( found_not_empty_line ) {
empty_lines_in_tail ++;
} else {
empty_lines_in_head ++;
}
}
{
lines_count ++;
}
END {
print (empty_lines_in_head " " empty_lines_in_tail " " lines_count);
}
' "$file"))
empty_lines_in_head=${result[0]}
empty_lines_in_tail=${result[1]}
lines_count=${result[2]}
if [ $empty_lines_in_head -gt 0 ] || [ $empty_lines_in_tail -gt 0 ]; then
echo "Removing whitespace from \"$file\""
eval "gawk -i inplace '
{
if ( NR > $empty_lines_in_head && NR <= $(($lines_count - $empty_lines_in_tail)) ) {
print
}
}
' \"$file\""
fi
Because I was writing a bash script anyway containing some functions, I found it convenient to write those:
function strip_leading_empty_lines()
{
while read line; do
if [ -n "$line" ]; then
echo "$line"
break
fi
done
cat
}
function strip_trailing_empty_lines()
{
acc=""
while read line; do
acc+="$line"$'\n'
if [ -n "$line" ]; then
echo -n "$acc"
acc=""
fi
done
}

insert header to a file

I would like to hear your directions on how to insert lines of header (all lines in a file) to another file (more bigger, several GB). I prefer the Unix/awk/sed ways of do that job.
# header I need to insert to another, they are in a file named "header".
##fileformat=VCFv4.0
##fileDate=20090805
##source=myImputationProgramV3.1
##reference=1000GenomesPilot-NCBI36
##phasing=partial
##INFO=<ID=NS,Number=1,Type=Integer,Description="Number of Samples With Data">
##INFO=<ID=DP,Number=1,Type=Integer,Description="Total Depth">
##INFO=<ID=AF,Number=.,Type=Float,Description="Allele Frequency">
##INFO=<ID=AA,Number=1,Type=String,Description="Ancestral Allele">
##INFO=<ID=DB,Number=0,Type=Flag,Description="dbSNP membership, build 129">
##INFO=<ID=H2,Number=0,Type=Flag,Description="HapMap2 membership">
##FILTER=<ID=q10,Description="Quality below 10">
##FILTER=<ID=s50,Description="Less than 50% of samples have data">
##FORMAT=<ID=GT,Number=1,Type=String,Description="Genotype">
##FORMAT=<ID=GQ,Number=1,Type=Integer,Description="Genotype Quality">
##FORMAT=<ID=DP,Number=1,Type=Integer,Description="Read Depth">
##FORMAT=<ID=HQ,Number=2,Type=Integer,Description="Haplotype Quality">
#CHROM POS ID REF ALT QUAL FILTER INFO
header="/name/of/file/containing/header"
for file in "$#"
do
cat "$header" "$file" > /tmp/xx.$$
mv /tmp/xx.$$ "$file"
done
You might prefer to locate the temporary file on the same file system as the file you are editing, but anything that requires inserting data at the front of the file is going to end up working very close to this. If you are going to be doing this all day, every day, you might assemble something a little slicker, but the chances are the savings will be minuscule (fractions of a second per file).
If you really, really must use sed, then I suppose you could use:
header="/name/of/file/containing/header"
for file in "$#"
do
sed -e "0r $header" "$file" > /tmp/xx.$$
mv /tmp/xx.$$ "$file"
done
The command reads the content of header 'after' line 0 (before line 1), and then everything else is passed through unchanged. This isn't as swift as cat though.
An analogous construct using awk is:
header="/name/of/file/containing/header"
for file in "$#"
do
awk '{print}' "$header" "$file" > /tmp/xx.$$
mv /tmp/xx.$$ "$file"
done
This simply prints each input line on the output; again, not as swift as cat.
One more advantage of cat over sed or awk; cat will work even if the big files are mainly binary data (it is oblivious to the content of the files). Both sed and awk are designed to handle data split into lines; while modern versions will probably handle even binary data fairly well, it is not what they are designed for.
I did it all with a Perl script, because I had to traverse a directory tree and handle various file types differently. The basic script was
#!perl -w
process_directory(".");
sub process_directory {
my $dir = shift;
opendir DIR, $dir or die "$dir: not a directory\n";
my #files = readdir DIR;
closedir DIR;
foreach(#files) {
next if(/^\./ or /bin/ or /obj/); # ignore some directories
if(-d "$dir/$_") {
process_directory("$dir/$_");
} else {
fix_file("$dir/$_");
}
}
}
sub fix_file {
my $file = shift;
open SRC, $file or die "Can't open $file\n";
my $file = "$file-f";
open FIX, ">$fix" or die "Can't open $fix\n";
print FIX <<EOT;
-- Text to insert
EOT
while(<SRC>) {
print FIX;
}
close SRC;
close FIX;
my $oldfile = $file;
$oldFile =~ s/(.*)\.\(\w+)$/$1-old.$2/;
if(rename $file, $oldFile) {
rename $fix, $file;
}
}
Share and enjoy! Or not -- I'm no Perl hacker, so this is probably double-plus-unoptimal Perl code. Still, it worked for me!

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